Computer-telephony integration is often used when an organization wants to improve outward contact, such as contacts with its current or prospective customers. One example is a call center, where agents of the organization typically place or receive customer telephone calls. When a customer calls the organization, many call centers detect the customer's identity either by a caller identification service or by having the calling customer input an account number or other identification over the phone. Based on this identification, such a system may retrieve specific information from the computer system that is associated with the caller, such as the caller's account file or notes entered during an earlier call with the customer. The system can retrieve the records because it has stored a customer identifier either in the records or with them.
The relationship between the stored records (the customer file, notes, etc.) and the particular telephone call in the above examples is static. That is, the system provides the files because they have been purposely labeled in advance with the customer's identification. The system does not register whether the agent actually looks at records during any particular phone call. Moreover, the system does not take into account whether the agent frequently needs to look up another record while being on the phone with a particular customer.
The fact that only records purposely labeled in advance are provided during the phone call makes it less useful to implement such a system in environments other than a traditional call center. A person working in a human resources department of a large corporation, for example, may have daily telephone contact with a number of managers, employees and other personnel. Each of these calls may require the person to access different computer records. Moreover, the telephone calls in this and other examples are far less predictable than are calls a conventional call center. It would be difficult and impracticable to label the myriad available records with identifiers representing the broad group of people that call such that the records could be provided for the respective phone calls.